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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

This article failed to mention what seems to me like one of the most important aspects of the competition: team dynamics.

Mercedes is the only team (as far as I know) that says things like "we win as a team and lose as a team", try to hold blame-free retrospectives, open collaboration between various sub-teams, and so on.

Every other team goes for cut-throat competition between individuals. "You have to prove yourself or you're out", mistakes are held against you, and so on.

Guess which team has won the last 8 constructor's championships?

I can't believe people aren't talking more about this.

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If you believe what you see in Drive To Survive then you think the above (which is a big problem with the series). In reality it’s not true. Mercedes are successful because they had a huge head start on the new hybrid engine regs and hired one of the most talented drivers in history. Management is important but “we win and lose as a team” is marketing. The Hamilton/Rosberg era illustrated a lot of cracks in that marketing.

Interesting! Do you have further reading I can look into?

Do you know why the Drive To Survive authors would slant things this way?

Yeah just so you know that show twisted all kinds of things to add to the drama. More drivers speak out every season about how audio clips of them were edited to make them sound more adversarial to their team mate, etc. and they really don't feel that way. Look at the social media comments about it from fans, and everyone feels like they ignored the big stories everyone really talked about and just fixated on drama.

But a lot of teams have historically had this "we win as a team" vibe and done things like expect the #2 driver to obey team orders and give up position to let the #1 driver score more points and increase the odds of the driver's championship going to a driver from that team. I don't have further reading on this topic specifically, but if you're wanting to learn more and you're in the HN crowd, Steve Matchett's books are awesome and Adrian Newey's autobiography is also pretty good and covers a lot of the last couple of decades with a ton of cool technical detail.

That's it's whole purpose, to get people watching that wouldn't normally watch F1.

When F1 had the idea, Amazon offered them more money, but they went with Netflix because it was more about getting eyeballs on the show so they would then come and watch the sport.

It's entirely marketing and designed to bring people into the sport, also a lot of the top teams/drivers don't provide a huge amount of access as they get in the way / give away secrets / make crap up that makes them look bad, so they focus more heavily on smaller teams and have to invent stories there to make it seem exciting.

Because it makes the "story" more interesting? It's not an f1 documentary. It's a show based on f1. There is a difference.

> says things like "we win as a team and lose as a team"

This is pretty common amongst teams that are on a strong winning streak. Red Bull were very much this way during Vettel's dominance years too.

Ferrari in recent years are extremely this way as well, it just presents in a different way. If a driver speaks out negatively about the team, they're shown the door pretty quickly.

That's in no way completely true. You're essentially 100% buying into the Mercedes propaganda.

Mercedes talk a mean game but whenever they are under pressure they play just as nasty as everyone else on the grid.

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